If you can type or talk, you can probably vibe code. It's really that easy. You simply communicate your idea to the AI chatbot of your choice with natural language, and it will get to work. While all projects may not end up being a pearly gem or even entirely functional, the effort involved to create a web app by just chatting is minimal.
I've played around with vibe coding quite a bit, creating random projects here and there. I've mostly tried it out for proof of concept or just chatbot testing purposes, but rarely in an attempt to make something crucial or functional to the point where I'd see myself using it daily. Then I began looking for an e-reader device and walked away frustrated by how incredibly "dumb" most of them are, especially Kindles. More on that later.
Regardless of the motivation (but mostly in defiance of Amazon), it prompted me to try to vibe code a fix, but with a twist. I wanted to see if I could vibe code a functional e-reading application with all of the features I wanted. Knowing that even if I got this thing up and running, I likely wouldn't use this daily, but I wanted to add some flair.
The question became what AI chatbot to use. I didn't bother trying to choose. I used Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT to create what I wanted and then see if one produced better results.
The prompt
Comparing chatbots is hard to do, especially when trying to mimic the same conversation or vibe coding project. Believe me, I've tried. I wanted to make sure all of the tools I tested were using the same prompt, but first, I wanted to refine that prompt to get the best results, so I came up with a strategy to get me there.
First, I built the entire project at its most basic level with Gemini. Once I liked where the project was (successful and functional proof of concept), I asked it to create a prompt so that I could add it to any other chatbot. Gemini generated the prompt, I saved it as a file, and I uploaded it to Claude. I went through this process again, allowing Claude to catch and fix things I hadn't thought about when building the project and Gemini. Once that process was complete, I asked it to create another prompt so I could add it to ChatGPT.
The idea was to have all three chatbots have some input on the actual creation of the project and, in turn, the final prompt. Once the prompt was created, I uploaded it to all three chatbots in a separate chat to see how consistently they performed.
The project: The Tome Reader
This project was born out of my frustration with Amazon's Kindle devices. Anyone who likes to read and listen to their books can do so with real-time highlighting in the app for iOS or Android, but after all this time -- nearly 20 years -- you can't do this on a Kindle. In fact, it wasn't long ago that users gained the ability to achieve real-time text highlighting with the assistive reader playing, which is so close to the app's functionality. As of right now, you can only read or listen to an audiobook on Kindle, not both, which is laughable, and so was the idea of Amazon owning all my books. I got to thinking that I could just vibe code a solution. I call it the Tome Reader.
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